Pentecost reflections John 15:26 - 16:15

John 15:26 - 16:15 Gospel reading for Pentecost Sunday 27th May 2012

Christian churches across the Western world will this Sunday celebrate Pentecost.

Pentecost literally translated from the Greek, is "fiftieth". The fiftieth day after Easter Sunday - 7 weeks plus a day (both Sunday's included). The actual account of Pentecost can be read in chapter 2 of the book of Acts .

Anyone not brought up in a Christian environment might well ask - "OK so what does all that mean?"  A standard response might be something like ... "Oh ... that's when God first poured out His Holy Spirit on His disciples and the followers of Jesus."

As you can see, it only gets worse! To the uninitiated, if we start talking "cold turkey" about things like Pentecost or the Holy Spirit, we could well be accused of being from another planet or missing a few marbles! As far as language is concerned, the same applies to a host of other words like baptism, communion, salvation, sin etc. We need to choose our words with extreme caution when trying to help others make some sense out of terms that are totally foreign language to an increasing proportion of young people and families (and dare I say even some staff) in our school communities.

So what do we make of this SPIRIT stuff?  For example how do all of these forms of SPIRIT fit together?

• God's spirit,
• our spirit,
• the human spirit,
• Jesus' spirit,
• Holy Spirit,
• and what about the breath / spirit of the old and new testaments which use the same word: ruah in the OT Hebrew and pneuma in the NT Greek?

At this point I could proceed to launch into a traditional, doctrinally based view of the Holy Spirit (which would of course necessitate introducing still more "religious jargon" -e.g the Trinity), but I see it as one of my great challenges generally, to write rather with a view that is going to help us as school leaders to genuinely engage with the growing proportion of our clientele for whom many Christian concepts and language is mumbo jumbo. What we are doing in fact, is searching for a spirituality for the digital world of the 21st century in which we operate. Such a spirituality does not drop people in the deep end of Christianity ... God sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross to save us from our sins ... man that's heavy stuff!

Ultimately of course, our aim needs to be to gently draw people into a Christian spirituality framework - but where do we start and how do we proceed in order to get to that point? I know that I cannot do justice to this huge topic in a short reflections post ... so I think that's another story for another day ... but personally I think the word MYSTERY is essential to any attempted explanation.

Final comments for now ... God has chosen to progressively reveal himself in a range of mysterious ways. After His cameo appearance here on earth as a human being, for whatever reason He decided that He would move into a new way of revealing himself to His people. After Jesus' spectacular resurrection and his recall from earth, God chose to make available to all of us a mysterious new helper the Holy Spirit. The genius of this new arrangement, is that through the mystery of the Holy Spirit working in us we are able to see God and grow in our relationship with Him. The further master stroke of God has been in tying the Holy Spirit into the special sources of Word and Sacrament ... a reminder to us of where to source ongoing strength for our day-to-day work and for our journey as a whole.

For additional Pentecost thoughts, see Gospel Reflections from May 17 2010.

Nev